Quivira 4.1

Quivira 4.1 contains 11,053 characters.

• Download .otf-file
• Testpage for printing (PDF)
• Overview of characters (PDF)
• Combining characters (PDF)
• List of Private Use characters (PDF)

Overview

You can use all characters in common office programs. To insert characters you cannot type directly you need a character map. There are some issues with certain characters, see notes.

Supported Unicode blocks

Full list of supported blocks.

Private Use Area

Quivira contains 888 non-standardised characters in the Private Use Area. Rendering software will treat them as symbols with unknown meanings, and other fonts may use the same codepoints for totally different characters.

Future additions

There is no roadmap for future versions. The decision about new characters is made spontaneously.

Quivira 4.1 contains 11,053 characters from various Unicode blocks. Most of them are expected to work correctly everywhere, but there are some issues with characters that have codepoints higher than 65,535 and combining characters.

The meaning, names and usage of characters are defined in the Unicode Standard. Characters you cannot type directly can be inserted using a character map, e.g. the one coming with Microsoft Windows (at “Start” → “Programs” → “Accessories” → “System Programs” → “Character Map”. Also, office programs usually have a dialogue for inserting them. However, these dialogues do not always show all characters, even if the programs can display all of them. If you’re using Microsoft Windows, I recommend the BabelMap which not only shows all characters, but also their names and properties.

The following Unicode blocks are supported:

Basic Latin (00000 – 0007F)

Complete (95 characters)

Latin-1 Supplement (00080 – 000FF)

Complete (96 characters)

Latin Extended-A (00100 – 0017F)

Complete (128 characters)

Latin Extended-B (00180 – 0024F)

Complete (208 characters)

IPA Extensions (00250 – 002AF)

Complete (96 characters)

Spacing Modifier Letters (002B0 – 002FF)

Complete (80 characters)

Combining Diacritical Marks (00300 – 0036F)

Complete (111 characters)

Greek and Coptic (00370 – 003FF)

Complete (135 characters)

Cyrillic (00400 – 004FF)

Complete (256 characters)

Cyrillic Supplement (00500 – 00520)

Complete (48 characters)

Armenian (00530 – 0058F)

Complete (89 characters)

Hebrew (00590 – 005FF)

Complete (87 characters)

Samaritan (00800 – 0083F)

Complete (61 characters)

Thai (00E00 – 00E7F)

Complete (87 characters)

Georgian (010A0 – 010FF)

Complete (83 characters)

Cherokee (013A0 – 013FF)

Complete (85 characters)

Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (01400 – 0167F)

Complete (640 characters)

Ogham (01680 – 0169F)

Complete (29 characters)

Runic (016A0 – 016FF)

Complete (87 characters)

Tagalog (01700 – 0171F)

Complete (20 characters)

Hanunoo (01720 – 0173F)

Complete (23 characters)

Buhid (01740 – 0175F)

Complete (20 characters)

Tagbanwa (01760 – 0177F)

Complete (18 characters)

Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics Extended (018B0 – 018FF)

Complete (70 characters)

Phonetic Extensions (01D00 – 01D7F)

Complete (128 characters)

Phonetic Extensions Supplement (01D80 – 01DBF)

Complete (64 characters)

Latin Extended Additional (01E00 – 01EFF)

Complete (256 characters)

Greek Extended (01F00 – 01FFF)

Complete (233 characters)

General Punctuation (02000 – 0206F)

Complete (85 characters)

Superscripts and Subscripts (02070 – 0209F)

Complete (42 characters)

Currency Symbols (020A0 – 020CF)

Complete (30 characters)

Letterlike Symbols (02100 – 0214F)

Complete (80 characters)

Number Forms (02150 – 0218F)

Complete (58 characters)

Arrows (02190 – 021FF)

Complete (112 characters)

Mathematical Operators (02200 – 022FF)

Complete (256 characters)

Miscellaneous Technical (02300 – 023FF)

Complete (251 characters)

Control Pictures (02400 – 0243F)

Complete (39 characters)

Optical Character Recognition (02440 – 0245F)

Complete (11 characters)

Enclosed Alphanumerics (02460 – 024FF)

Complete (160 characters)

Box Drawing (02500 – 0257F)

Complete (128 characters)

Block Elements (02580 – 0259F)

Complete (32 characters)

Geometric Shapes (025A0 – 025FF)

Complete (96 characters)

Miscellaneous Symbols (02600 – 026FF)

220 characters (out of 256)

Dingbats (02700 – 027BF)

160 characters (out of 192)

Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A (027C0 – 027EF)

Complete (46 characters)

Supplemental Arrows-A (027F0 – 027FF)

Complete (16 characters)

Braille Patterns (02800 – 028FF)

Complete (256 characters)

Supplemental Arrows-B (02900 – 0297F)

Complete (128 characters)

Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B (02980 – 029FF)

Complete (128 characters)

Supplemental Mathematical Operators (02A00 – 02AFF)

Complete (256 characters)

Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (02B00 – 02BFF)

Complete (202 characters)

Glagolitic (02C00 – 02C5F)

Complete (94 characters)

Latin Extended-C (02C60 – 02C7F)

Complete (32 characters)

Coptic (02C80 – 02CFF)

Complete (121 characters)

Georgian Supplement (02D00 – 02D2F)

Complete (38 characters)

Tifinagh (02D30 – 02D7F)

Complete (56 characters)

Cyrillic Extended-A (02DE0 – 02DFF)

Complete (32 characters)

Supplemental Punctuation (02E00 – 02E7F)

Complete (67 characters)

Ideographic Description Characters (02FF0 – 02FFF)

Complete (12 characters)

CJK Symbols and Punctuation (03000 – 0303F)

8 characters (out of 64)

Enclosed CJK Letters and Months (03200 – 032FF)

39 characters (out of 254)

Yijing Hexagram Symbols (04DC0 – 04DFF)

Complete (64 characters)

Lisu (0A4D0 – 0A4FF)

Complete (48 characters)

Vai (0A500 – 0A63F)

Complete (300 characters)

Cyrillic Extended-B (0A640 – 0A69F)

Complete (95 characters)

Modifier Tone Letters (0A700 – 0A71F)

Complete (32 characters)

Latin Extended-D (0A720 – 0A7FF)

Complete (152 characters)

Private Use Area (0E000 – 0F8FF)

888 characters

These characters are not defined in the Unicode Standard, see below.

Alphabetic Presentation Forms (0FB00 – 0FB4F)

Complete (58 characters)

Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms (0FF00 – 0FFEF)

110 characters (out of 225)

These are fixed width variants of the Basic Latin characters, meant for use with East-Asian ideographs.¹

Specials (0FFF0 – 0FFFF)

Complete (5 characters)

Aegean Numbers (10100 – 1013F)

Complete (57 characters)

Ancient Greek Numbers (10140 – 1018F)

Complete (77 characters)

Ancient Symbols (10190 – 101CF)

Complete (13 characters)

Lycian (10280 – 1029F)

Complete (29 characters)

Carian (102A0 – 102DF)

Complete (49 characters)

Old Italic (10300 – 1032F)

Complete (36 characters)

Gothic (10330 – 1034F)

Complete (27 characters)

Ugaritic (10380 – 1039F)

Complete (31 characters)

Imperial Aramaic (10840 – 1085F)

Complete (31 characters)

Phoenician (10900 – 1091F)

Complete (29 characters)

Lydian (10920 – 1093F)

Complete (27 characters)

Old South Arabian (10A60 – 10A7F)

Complete (32 characters)

Old Turkic (10C00 – 10C4F)

Complete (73 characters)

Musical Symbols (1D100 – 1D1FF)

83 characters (out of 220)

Ancient Greek Musical Notation (1D200 – 1D24F)

Complete (70 characters)

Tai Xuan Jing Symbols (1D300 – 1D35F)

Complete (87 characters)

Counting Rod Numerals (1D360 – 1D37F)

Complete (18 characters)

Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols (1D400 – 1D7FF)

Complete (996 characters)

Mahjong Tiles (1F000 – 1F02F)

Complete (44 characters)

Domino Tiles (1F030 – 1F09F)

Complete (100 characters)

Playing Cards (1F0A0 – 1F0FF)

Complete (82 characters)

Enclosed Alphanumerics Supplement (1F100 – 1F1FF)

Complete (173 characters)

Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs (1F300 – 1F5FF)

191 characters (out of 742)

Emoticons (1F600 – 16F4F)

Complete (78 characters)

Alchemical Symbols (1F700 – 1F77F)

Complete (116 characters)

Geometric Shapes Extended (1F780 – 1F7FF)

64 characters (out of 85)

¹ As Quivira does not support ideographs, the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms characters are quite useless. They are only included because they are used internally to compose the Control Characters.

Quivira 4.1 contains 888 characters in the Unicode block “Private Use Area”. They have generic names like “PRIVATE USE CHARACTER-E000” (the last part being their codepoints in hexadecimal notation) and the General Category “Co [Other, Private Use]”.

In Quivira, the Private Use Area is divided into self-invented blocks, and the characters are given names much like the standardised characters. However, these blocks and names are own inventions and only used in the documentation of Quivira to give hints what these characters are meant for. They are not approved by any standard (like e.g. Unicode) and will not be used or displayed by any program (the Unicode names mentioned above will be used instead).

For the same reason, they do not have any defined properties, so rendering programs do not know whether they are letters, symbols or whatever else. Conversion between upper- and lowercase letters, small caps and so on will not work. Spell checking software will not recognize them and treat them as symbols. If you change the font, they will not be displayed correctly any more, because the other font may use the same codepoints for totally different characters (or may not use them at all).

In the Unicode standard, an adopted character will never be changed nor removed in future versions of Unicode. However, Quivira’s Private Use Area is not as stable: If a Private Use character is adopted into Unicode, it is moved from its private use codepoint to its new standardised codepoint. For this reason, the Private Use Area only contains characters which are unlikely to be approved by the Unicode Consortium.

See the PDF file List of Private Use characters for detailed descriptions.

The development of Quivira is still in progress, but as I do it in my free time, new versions occur very irregularly. I cannot predict when the next version will be ready for release.

Also, I decide about the characters to include very spontaneously, i.e. there is no roadmap for future versions. If you need a special character or script, you can contact me and I will try to include it in the next possible version (this may still take some months, though).

Please note that there are some kinds of characters that will not be included, even if requested. These are:

• Characters that contradict the Unicode standard, e.g. slightly different glyphs for existing characters. If you like variation, use different fonts, but don’t confuse your spell checking software with unnecessary private use characters.
• Characters that are in the Unicode Pipeline Table (Proposed New Characters). I cannot assign them to the Code Point they will probably get in the Unicode Standard, because it may change before final adoption. I also don’t like to assign them to private use codepoints, because then I have to re-assign them in future versions, thus either having duplicates or destroying existing documents.
• Characters that are technically impossible. In an OpenType font, glyphs cannot be coloured,¹ animated or protrude outside the line.
• Characters that belong to unsupported scripts. E.g. it wouldn’t make sense to include a rare Chinese ideograph without also having the common ones.

In future, Quivira is meant to support as many scripts and languages as possible, but there are limits. The first limit is the mere number of defined characters which cannot be reached by a single font. For this reason, Quivira does not support the Han ideographs (their number is greater than that of all other scripts together).

The second limit is the complexity of some scripts: For some characters I could include some nice glyphs, but a text containing them would not be rendered correctly. This issue mainly affects most of the Indian and Southeast Asian scripts, but it also affects letters which change their forms depending on surrounding letters, like e.g. in Arabic (this is the reason why Arabic isn’t supported yet, despite its importance).

Thanks to the OpenType format Quivira uses since version 4.0, the mentioned features are now possible, but still a lot of work. Therefore I still prefer scripts that need no or little OpenType scripting.

¹ In the meantime, coloured glyphs have become possible. However, so far Quivira does not contain any.